by A.D. Winch
Chapter 22 - Professor Larsen’s Story
“You know each other?” asked Eric, not believing what he was hearing. He jumped away from Andrea as if she had suddenly given him an electric shock.
Andrea and Dr. Johansen nodded.
“And you knew he was going to kidnap me?” asked Eric, pointing accusingly between the two of them.
His jeans were sodden, and he was shivering as he spoke, both from the cold and anger. He felt betrayed.
“I have not spoken to Alexander in thirteen years, five months and eighteen days,” replied Andrea and put the gun in her pocket.
“We had lost contact,” added Dr. Johansen
His reply was a little too quick for Eric’s liking.
“I’m not surprised,” said Eric to Dr. Johansen. “You’re mad and Andrea’s the sanest person I know.”
He turned to Andrea, “You should have heard the things he told me. He’s a crazy man.”
“Go and get changed and meet us in the lounge,” Andrea replied. “There will be a hot chocolate waiting for you.”
The lounge was decorated in keeping with the age of the building. Landscape paintings hung on the emerald green walls, and a faded, Persian rug covered most of the floor. Around the rug were three Edwardian, leather sofas and in the centre of it a mahogany, coffee table, upon which was a steaming mug of hot chocolate.
Ten minutes later Eric entered through the heavy door. He looked less tense than he had been in the gardener’s storeroom. He had changed into his cotton pyjamas and a white dressing gown. He stood in the doorway and tried to understand the relationship between Andrea and Dr. Johansen. They were sat on one of the sofas talking. At one end was Dr. Johansen, his face switching between excitement and fear as he spoke. Andrea sat at the other end, just listening and without any signs of emotion.
Eric walked sleepily across the rug towards the coffee table. He was enjoying the soft feel of the threads between his toes. He took his mug in two hands, shot a displeased glance at the adults and lay down on the sofa opposite them.
“It is very late, Eric,” Andrea began, “I would like you to drink your hot chocolate and then go to bed.”
“I’m not tired,” answered Eric, between yawns. “I want to hear him tell you what he has told me.”
Eric lifted a finger from the mug and pointed it angrily at Dr. Johansen.
“That will not be necessary,” Andrea replied calmly. “I already know what Alexander has told you. You do not need to worry about it now.”
“How do you know?” asked Eric slowly, fighting to keep his eyes open while yawning.
Before she could explain, Eric was fast asleep. The mug resting on his chest rocked gently up and down as he breathed.
The next morning, Eric woke up to find himself back in his own bed, and Ursula sat on the boxing glove bean bag watching him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked sharply.
“I was worried about you and you’ve got more white hair, so I think I was right to worry,” replied Ursula, bringing her knees up to her chin.
She was wearing her favourite ripped jeans and the new hoodie she had received in Paris. Even though she was the same height as Eric, he felt that she looked smaller this morning.
Worry has shrunk her, he thought.
Eric regretted being so sharp and tried to make up for it. He had never known another child to worry about him before.
Perhaps this is what friends do, he thought.
“I’m fine thanks. Er, how are you?” he asked politely.
Ursula uncurled herself before answering and bounced up onto the end of Eric’s bed.
“I don’t know really. I guess I feel confused... and excited... and worried.”
“Er, why?” Eric asked. He was not used to morning conversations in his bedroom as it was not something that happened that much.
“I knew where you were last night. You were in the Kino Alfa, the old cinema, weren’t you?”
Eric nodded.
“And I knew you were sort of okay until you left and then I started to worry about you and then I fell asleep.”
“So?”
“So? We can read each other minds. Can’t you see?”
Yawning, Eric thought about it and then replied, “Yesterday when I escaped from school you were worried about me, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But then I tried to send you a good thought and you felt okay.”
Ursula smiled.
“And is this why you are excited and confused?”
“Yes,” replied Ursula still smiling.
“So, why are you worried?”
The smile disappeared from Ursula’s face in a flash, “Because I can’t find Andrea. I haven’t seen her all morning.”
It was like a rocket had gone off beneath Eric, and he exploded out of bed. The duvet, other bed covers and pillows flew to all corners of the room. He grabbed a pair of jeans, pulled them on, put on a T-shirt, and headed for the door.
Under his breath he was muttering, “I should never have let him in. I should never have let him in.”
The two of them went first to Andrea’s room. It was empty and looked as if it hadn’t been used, which was not that unusual. They searched the other rooms on their floor of the villa, but they were also all empty, so they went down to the lounge. Apart from Eric’s mug on the coffee table, there was no sign that anyone had been there. The kitchen was also empty but, on entering the pantry, they discovered the cellar door open.
Strolling forward, Ursula looked down the dark passageway, but Eric stood well back. Beads of perspiration were forming on his brow, and he was nervously moving jars of jam on a shelf.
“There’s a light at the end coming through a half open door. If we run down the corridor, we can reach it in only a few seconds. I’ll go first and then all you have to do is look at me,” suggested Ursula.
For a moment, Eric did not move but then the thought of losing Andrea overcame him, and he placed his hands on Ursula’s shoulders.
“Let’s go,” he whispered in her ear.
They sprinted down the passageway. When they reached the door, Ursula opened it fully, and they stepped cautiously into the room beyond.
They stood on a very high platform at the top of a cave. Beside them was a rock face and coming out from it were steps leading down. Each one was a piece of rock and, even though they all had flat tops, none were the same size or shape. In front of them, hanging from the rock ceiling, was a circular floodlight which bathed the floor in bright light. All the other sides of the room were covered, if not entirely, in walls made from terracotta brick. The walls curved dangerously over rounded rocks faces and looked very unstable.
The floor of the large room looked like polished marble and was covered with piles of strange looking objects. Some were as small as a mobile phone and others were as big as a car. Some looked like guns and others like hairdryers. Many looked like rockets; a few looked like vehicles, but most looked like junk. There were so many it was hard to take them all in.
Step by step, as quietly as they could, Eric and Ursula descended the rock staircase. A dull whirring noise, barely noticeable at first, became slightly louder with each step they took. By the time they reached the floor it was the same volume as a car engine ticking over. Away from the stairs and behind the scattered objects was a doorway hidden in the brick work. The sound was coming from behind the doors.
They tip-toed through the objects and into another brick-walled room. It was much smaller than the first one and about the size of an average kitchen. One side of it was taken up with two large screens, nine smaller ones and a computer the size of six fridge freezers. Lights flashed behind glass doors; metres of multi-coloured cables joined up countless circuit boards, and six fans whirred noisily to keep everything else cool.
Standing in front of the computer, staring at one of the large screens, were Andrea and Dr. Johanse
n. They were watching the flickering image of a grey-haired lady.
Falsely, Eric coughed, something he had inherited from his father. The two adults turned around. Dark bags were visible under Dr. Johansen’s eyes, and both he and Andrea were wearing the same clothes as the previous evening.
“Good, you are up,” said Andrea and paused the image on the screen.
She turned to Dr. Johansen and pointed towards Ursula, “Alexander, this is...”
His tired eyes lit up, and he put out his hand. “Ev...”
“Ursula,” said Ursula, talking over him.
“Of course, Ursula,” he said her name slowly as if each syllable was new to him. “A very real pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Eric stepped between them and nodded towards the screen, “Who is that?”
Neither Andrea nor Dr. Johansen spoke and instead looked from one to the other. Eric recognized this behaviour from his parents. They did it when they wanted to avoid telling him something.
“Telling them is against my instructions,” Andrea told Dr. Johansen.
“I think we have debated it enough,” he replied seriously. “It is best that they find it all out now. From what you have told me it is obvious that they have started to piece together some of their story already.”
In the corner of the room were two swivel chairs. Dr. Johansen fetched them both, placed them in front of the screen and beckoned the children to sit down.
“This will answer your question,” Andrea said and pressed play.
Eric and Ursula sat down silently. Each could feel the other’s worry as well as their own.
Black and white lines crisscrossed the screen and replaced the woman. They flickered some more and then the woman reappeared and began to speak. She looked to be in her seventies or eighties. Her hair was silver and tied back neatly away from her face, which was covered in smooth wrinkles. Her eyes were her most striking feature; they were sky blue and as bright as a child’s.
When she spoke she did not rush, as if each word brought a new thought into her mind or awoke a distant memory. Even though, she looked content and peaceful, she also seemed sad and tired.
“This is disc one of four. Both pods contain identical discs. Disc one is a history, an autobiography if you like. Disc two details my research with supportive data. Disc three explains how I spliced together DNA, the building blocks of life. And Disc four goes into depth about how I created life.”
Andrea stepped forward and pressed pause.
“There are actually five Compact Discs; Professor Larsen added another after this. However, the fifth was corrupted, and I cannot get it to work no matter what I try.”
She pressed play again and stepped back.
The grey-haired lady continued her story. “It is of the most urgent importance that none of these discs fall into the wrong hands. It would be better for the world if they were destroyed than for this to happen. I do not choose my words lightly.
“My name is not Professor Larsen but that is what I am known as. For reasons that will become clearer later I had to change it for my own protection. From the late nineteen forties through to the early sixties I worked at a top secret military base in the USA with my husband. We were in charge of dissecting an alien craft and using its technology to further our own. At first we worked closely together but in nineteen sixty-one, with the craft’s possibilities exhausted, we were handed separate assignments. Mine was in the relatively new field of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. In simple terms, I was given the job of creating the world’s first robot using the alien technology. My husband was moved into the field of biology and physiology.
“We were government scientists and sworn to secrecy. For this reason, we never discussed our work in our own quarters, or anywhere else for that matter.”
She paused and ran her fingers over her hair until she was happy that it was still in place. For a moment her eyes lost their shine and became vacant, as if something inside her had died, and then she continued.
“One morning in nineteen sixty-six, I felt sick and did not go into the lab. By the afternoon, I felt much better and decided to busy myself at home by tidying our quarters. After finishing every other room, I decided to clean my husband’s study, a room I rarely went into. Unlike me, he always brought his work home. It was what he lived for and what eventually took his life away. On top of his desk was a file marked ‘OPERATION MULATTO. TOP SECRET.' Curiosity got the better of me, and I sat down to read it. The documents detailed plans to create a separate and superior race of beings who would, initially at least, be soldiers. They would be fitter, stronger, smarter and able to communicate between themselves without words if necessary. To build such an army they were experimenting with joining together alien/human DNA to create Identical Hybrid Beings or IHBs. I simply called them Hybrids. I was shocked and appalled. It went against everything I believed in but, as I was not meant to see these files; I said nothing.
“Two or three days later my husband brought his Director back for dinner. After a few bourbons had loosened his tongue, the Director talked at length about his vision for the future. It was to be a future in which the USA was the only global superpower, unchallenged by the rest of the world, with its own superior army. I looked over at my husband. He had drunk too much, and his eyes had glazed over.
“After the Director left I quizzed my husband on what had been said about superior power. His eyes were animated, sparkling even, and after another glass of bourbon, he probably said much more than he meant to. I still remember his words to this day. ‘Imagine a world where everyone is fitter, stronger, healthier, cleverer and no one is different. No poor people, no sick people, no needy people. A new era. Isn’t that something to aim for, a leap forward in human evolution orchestrated by science.’
“Maybe I should have said something there and then but, regrettably, I said nothing. Fear held my tongue. I couldn’t say a word. I didn’t see a new era. I saw a catastrophe for humankind. Evolution takes millions of years. To mess with it in this way was against the very meaning of life. We evolved until we could breathe on land; we evolved thumbs until we could pick up objects and use tools; we evolved an advanced brain until we ruled the planet, and we all evolved differently. No two humans are the same, not even twins, and it is this difference that makes us human and keeps us advancing or evolving. A race of Hybrids who are all identical would not be a step forward in evolution. It would be a step backwards. If they succeeded in creating an army of genetically engineered soldiers what would be next? Who is to say that it would stop there? Would they then create different hybrids to fill different roles? Hybrid police or scientists or fruit pickers or accountants or cleaners, each of them with a life mapped out for them before they are even born. It would be like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”
She stopped talking, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them again, she pulled a metallic bag from off camera. A clear tube protruded from one end, and she placed this in her mouth. After a few gulps, she let go of the bag. Slowly it floated away.
“I’m sorry. I am preaching and speculating. Speculation is guesswork, and it is not Science. I will return to my story and the facts.”
She paused and looked apologetic.
“It was at this time that I discovered I was pregnant. I wanted to bring up a child in a world full of diversity and colour. Not a world dominated by one global power and full of Hybrids. My next actions were not thought out; each was impulsive, and each act led to the next. I began a chain of events which, once started, I was unable to stop.
“I had been feeling unwell for a while and one evening I used this to my advantage. We had already agreed that I would leave the base for a few days to recover, and I had been granted permission by Major Marshall. The evening before I was going to leave I packed one suitcase with my essential belongings and alien DNA that I had already taken from the la
bs. I had a second suitcase which I filled with explosives I had stolen from the stores that afternoon. I told Major Marshall I had to leave early and needed to say goodbye to my husband. Major Marshall was extremely busy, but he was also understanding, and even drove me by jeep to the old hangar. The time was just after six when I arrived, and I had made my husband promise to leave before this. The underground lab was empty, and I quickly placed explosives set the timer and left. Fortunately, Major Marshall had not waited for me, so I walked out of the old hangar and into the desert away from the base. I never returned and never saw my husband again.
“Only twenty years later did I discover, at least to some degree, what had happened that night. The explosion had indeed stopped my husband’s work, and he was moved from this assignment to creating engines, rockets and missiles instead. At the time, I had no way of knowing that I had been successful. A secret explosion, underground, and on a secret base was never going to make the public news.
“I managed to disappear off the radar. From the USA, I tried to travel into Canada but failed but then I managed to get to the Soviet Union instead. After some time, I fled down to the Ukraine as it is called now, into Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia as it was then and finally fleeing into Austria and Western Europe. Times were harsh, especially after giving birth, but behind the Iron Curtain, I was an enemy of the United States of America, with secrets to sell, and at first this made me a very dear friend of the Soviets.
“As I mentioned I had no way of knowing if my husband’s work had been destroyed or not. Eating away at the back of my mind was one thought and one thought alone. What if they were still working towards the creation of their Hybrid army? And if they were, how could they be stopped? Over the following years, I debated with myself, almost daily, the best response to these questions. In the end, when I arrived back in the West, I felt I had no choice but to follow a similar course of action myself. If they were to create an identical army of Hybrids to help them take over the planet then I would create two unique humans who could help defend it. Two people who would be made up of the greatest human beings on the planet.
“In justifying this to myself, I argued that these two may assist the next stage of human evolution but this would not be for certain. They would not be a leap forward, but rather the scientific equivalent of giving evolution a helping hand. If Darwin was right, as I feel he was, nature would decide whether this next stage would live on or die out - the survival of the fittest.
“Over the next few years I collected the genes and DNA from many great and talented people to go with my alien samples. On days when I was not trying to splice them together, I worked on creating a test tube baby. All my research was conducted in complete secrecy. Only two others knew what I was doing, but I am one hundred percent certain that they will not share this information with anyone else unless it is essential.
“In the early nineties the person I was running from found me working at the European Space Operations Centre. He wanted me to come back to the USA and, when I refused, I feared for my life. If my visas and travel patterns were to be believed, I had vanished into India. In fact, I had moved not more than two hundred kilometres away, to a place that was impossible to find on Earth.
“I moved into space and have been living here, on the European Space Station, for a number of years. Mostly I am alone.” She paused, lost in thought.
“I refuse to go back to Earth. The European Space Centre tolerate me and my whims because some of my work here provides a large percentage of their funds each year. Truthfully, I know I am an embarrassment to them - a cranky old lady who refuses to come back down to Earth. For this reason, my existence is barely mentioned within the centre walls in Germany and never outside. John Glenn travelled into space at the age of seventy-seven, and he is applauded as a hero. I travel into space at seventy-eight, and I am spoken about in hushed whispers.
“Really, I should be grateful. The peace, solitude, closer proximity to the sun and environment here have allowed me to complete my research and make discoveries I could never have made on Earth.”
She stopped talking and stepped out of the camera shot. White plastic walls, covered with faint flashing lights, were revealed. Floating around in front of them and leaking tiny droplets of water was the bag from which she had drunk earlier.
A large, white blur filled the screen and then Professor Larsen appeared back in the shot. A broad smile had appeared across her face; her eyes were warm, and she looked as if she had suddenly blossomed. She placed two small objects far too close to the camera and let go. They were very blurred, and all that Eric and Ursula could make out on the screen were two splodges of colour, one blue and one yellow.
“These little wonders are Adam and Eve,” she announced proudly.
Gradually the small blobs floated away from the camera and came into focus. They were two smiling babies. One had beautiful ebony skin, black hair and was obviously a girl. The other was a pale boy with blond hair.
Black and white lines filled the screen. The CD stopped and quietly ejected. Written in its centre was a small number one.
Eric and Ursula did not move.
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